Trigger warning for suicidal ideation, violent imagery, talk of depression and anxiety and disappointment in the NHS (and by extension the social security in Spain, which wasn’t any better).

Disclaimer: I am not a psychologist; I am not a qualified therapist, or a doctor, or anything of the sort. I talk about my lived experience and what I’ve glimpsed of others’ lived experience.

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I didn’t intend to begin this post like this, but I will: there’s something really messed up about the fact that the only mental health symptom considered an emergency is attempted suicide.

Here’s how I wanted to begin this post: there isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t think, “I want to kill myself.” Sometimes it’s empty words; sometimes it’s cathartic, the only way to let off steam without screaming. Sometimes it’s just a chorus playing over and over in my head. Sometimes it’s calmness: sometimes I hit rock bottom, and I think about dying, and it’s comforting. My most violent imagery happens those times, when I’m not anxious, when I’m instead calm — unbearably sad, disappointed, resigned — and it helps to picture ways to die.

In general, suicidal ideation is pervasive. The scale goes from those empty words I mentioned above to desire and intent. You need to attempt suicide, or be very, very clear you’re going to, to receive any sort of emergency help. To check into a mental hospital. Feeling like you’re going to explode doesn’t matter unless you plan to end your life. It doesn’t matter if you just want to be dead. Resources cannot be allocated to run-of-the-mill breakdowns.

Suicidal ideation is a symptom of many mental disorders, and I know plenty of people who struggle with it. But I rarely see talk of it in this blogosphere that — wonderfully — speaks up about anxiety and depression so often, and I want to do my part for it.

I’ve spent some of the past four days reading a story (fanfic, if you want to know; holler for a link if interested) about someone coming down with severe depression at university and struggling with that, with the usual crap that comes with first realizing you’re not completely sane, and with deciding what to do next: drop out? Take a break? Try to stick it through?

I talk a lot about my mental illness for many reasons. Some are long-term activist reasons, and some are more practical, immediate ones. Some are selfish, wanting to get the pain out of my head and maybe reach for support, and some are selfless. I want people to know they’re not the only ones going through it; I want to make it easier to talk about it; I want people to know there’s nothing embarrassing about having anxiety or depression or any other mental illness, that it’s a real illness like any physical one would be. I want people to know they have various options for treatment and not one of them is morally better than the others. That meds can help, and they don’t make you into a zombie most of the time. That there are ways to harm yourself that aren’t as publicly advertised as cutting but should be taken seriously, too. I want to — I want to speak up because I want other people to speak up because I want people suffering from these invisible illness to be able to tell a friend, a parent, a doctor without fear of being dismissed. And I want the professional treatment that is out there to be better. I want it to be more accessible, and I want it to be better suited for the people who need it.

But this is not a post about how I missed two cognitive behavioral therapy appointments meant to treat my major sleep schedule issues this summer by sleeping through them, and was summarily dismissed.

This is a post about my college experience. The first time round.

I moved to Madrid at the last possible minute, a rainy afternoon on the first of October in 2007. I was seventeen. I’m a November baby. I’d been on my first trip abroad just before then, on a scholarship the ministry gave out to promote ESL immersion learning. It had been my first time in London. I’d fucked up my foot badly, and barely eaten anything because I had limited funds and clothes took priority and my living arrangement, which the school I booked a course with — a scholarship requirement — had set up for me, included breakfast and dinner, but I hated the food the family liked, and I hadn’t cooked in my life myself. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know how dishwashers worked. I probably sprained my ankle or worse taking twenty-minute walks to the Bounds Green tube station wearing a pair of flimsy golden flats I’d bought in Valencia when I went to my cousin’s wedding in 2006.

I fell in love with the city. I fell in love with the weather, the architecture, the language, the parks. I fell in love with the tube and I fell in love with long walks going nowhere. I fell a little bit more in love with books.

And then I came home, on the 28th of September because I’d booked my trip for the last possible date that wouldn’t overlap with the beginning of university so I could catch a Millais exhibit at the Tate Britain. I got to see my favorite painting of all time in person, so I don’t regret it, even though the day I went to the exhibit, there was an evacuation at the museum for reasons I forget.

My point is, I went home to Ciudad Real, had two days to regroup, and repacked for Madrid. To live in a dorm. My father came with me, carried my suitcase. My relationship with him was already fairly strained, so it wasn’t the nicest trip of all time. It wasn’t awful, either. He’s always come through when I really needed it. He certainly saved my ass a year later when I missed my flight back from Heathrow.

So I went to Madrid, I found my dorm — the only one I’d been able to get a place in as I’d assumed people would start looking after they got their Selectividad grades, not before. It wasn’t a bad dorm. It was on a nice street. Busy, rainy. Wide road. It was a co-ed dorm, and the first thing I heard when I came down to the lobby after my father had left was a chant they’d made up to haze first-time students.

That wasn’t a very auspicious start, but I’m not going to blame my dropout on hazing. I think it’s bullshit, and I know a lot of first-years take it on like a badge of pride and there’s some sort of Stockholm Syndrome thing going on there that’s very concerning. But it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t aggressive, anyway. I was able to do my thing and be left alone. Eventually, I actually said: you know what, I’ve got tachycardia issues — I didn’t know it was mental health yet — and I can’t handle this. I can’t participate in this.

And they did respect my wishes. It did feel a bit like I’d be ostracized, or maybe I was told that. It didn’t feel like it made that much of a difference with my social anxiety generally keeping me from making friends anyway.

I met a girl in my first ever Philosophy class. Her name was Nuria and she was doing Philosophy at the same time as her last year of Art History. We talked and I bumped into a wall because of social anxiety and she had a car and she drove me to the tube station at one point. She had tennis courts somewhere. She said I should go up to her house to play. I’ve always wanted to play tennis.

I didn’t make it to a whole lot of classes, after that. I saw her again, a few times, but she’d got a proper group of friends who were actually around and I was awkward and I wasn’t making it to class all that often. I didn’t want to spend so long on the tube and then walking all the way from the Ciudad Universitaria station to the Philosophy building. I didn’t want to get up.

I was living in a dorm with severe social anxiety and without a laptop. My entire support system up till then — and even now — was people I could only communicate with via my laptop. I spent some time in the computer room upstairs. It was really uncomfortable. I could have found a Starbucks, maybe. I wasn’t as familiar with them in Madrid. My coffeehouse renaissance didn’t happen until Oxford in 2008. I borrowed my roommate’s laptop, sometimes. I couldn’t afford my own. I felt like that was holding me back from being able to do… god, everything. Research, write, write for fun, do uni work, stay sane.

I’d taken my father’s portable DVD player with me and my Gilmore Girls DVDs and I watched a lot of that. I watched Imagine Me and You and A Cinderella Story. I bought another Gilmore Girls boxset with my small allowance from my parents — 200€ a month. I don’t know how they were making enough money back then to give me that, survive themselves, and pay for my dorm until my scholarship came through in fucking December. My dorm mates were pooling together 600€ at a time to spend on booze to pour over first years during parties.

I didn’t understand that at all.

Most of all, though, I really fucked up my eating. The dining hall had long tables and I felt like I had to ask to sit with any group, and I was so anxious about it that I only went if I caught my roommate on the way down with her friends. I walked to Burger King in Callao and ate fast food. I was weak, and at one point, I got up, I got in the shower, and I fainted.

The bruise spanned my entire thigh and changed from yellow to blue to red to purple over the course of two or three weeks until it finally went away.

I don’t know if I’d had trich before, but the first incident of it I clearly remember is writing on my Moleskine journal on my birthday, completely depressed — not in the mental health way, I didn’t think at the time, just hopelessly sad — and pulling out the hairs on my eyebrows and letting them pile up on the slope on the inside of the notebook pages.

When December rolled around, when holidays arrived, I went home for good. I packed and I ate at the same Burger King in Callao while it was raining outside and I went home. I bought myself a MacBook and an iPod for Christmas. I wasn’t going back. I was going to try going by train, commuting from Ciudad Real every day. People did that; Renfe offered monthly passes for about 200-300€ per month for people who commuted to Madrid for work every day.

I think I managed to do that twice, in February.

In May, I bought a Canon camera. It’s the same one I still have. In between the laptop and the DSLR, I got some clothes, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books. I don’t know why I was pretending I might stick out the year. I intended to sit my exams in June, just to keep my scholarship, and I didn’t because I could do it in September and have it amount to the same thing.

I went to my faculty for the last time on September 6, 2008, with my Canon camera, after spending three weeks in Oxford and coming back with 4GB worth of pictures — and I wasn’t shooting RAW at the time. I took a lot of pictures of my way there. It was rainy on the train there, and sunny as I walked to sit my exams.

I signed up for the first two years of English Philology at my hometown’s university. I didn’t want to lose any time. I’d already lost a year. I dropped out eventually in the middle of a vicious circle of not being able to motivate myself to do any work because I didn’t know if my parents would be able to afford tuition for the first year, which I couldn’t get out of the government again since they’d already paid for my first year at Complutense.

My father was really proud of me for getting into Complutense, and hated my hometown’s university. My mom never liked that I’d switched from Math and sciences to Humanities for Bachillerato after having to put up with an awful Math teacher my fourth year of ESO (obligatory secondary education). I hated my hometown’s university, too, and I didn’t want to study English under professors who had worse accents than I did. I was a snob, getting less snobbish by the minute, but I still wasn’t happy. But I hadn’t been proud of going to Complutense, either, because all my chosen degree required was a passing grade from high school and Selectividad. I’d got my average back up to 8/10 after a truly disastrous fourth year of high school (ESO is four years, ages 11-12 to 15-16, and then Bachillerato is two years) that took my A+ student status to nearly having to resit the year for so many absences. This is a story for another time.

I don’t remember dropping out officially. I just remember no one ever saying I should see a doctor, no one considering the possibility that my constant tachycardia wasn’t just a freak physical pattern, no one suggesting medication, no one calling my trich trich until a fanfic exchange chat two years later. I didn’t make peace with having dropped out of the path I’d been so set on having for myself — high school, university, grad school, work; I couldn’t hold on to friends, but I performed really well academically, I loved exams, and that was supposed to be enough.

No one suggested taking a gap year. I don’t know if that was a possibility. No one suggested counselling, or talking to the university about support for people with disabilities because I didn’t even know the anxiety and depression I felt were mental health conditions, let alone that they were classed as disabilities. I didn’t know they were classed as disabilities until last year when someone said I might have luck applying for disability benefits, if my anxiety and depression were getting in the way of my life — which they were.

They have been. For years. Since that fourth year of high school, probably. Since the year I dropped out of college, probably. But I didn’t put a name to them until years later, and I didn’t get treatment until years later, and I didn’t know there was any support or resources available to me to help me continue my education despite having a mental health condition. Until now, I hadn’t even thought of that period of my life as a period where I had depression.

Today on Photodoto.com, I’m sharing a starter kit/basic guide to shooting in manual mode, largely inspired by bloggers who are afraid to dive in… much like I was. Click on the image or the link below it to go to the article and see the infographic I designed — or read the transcription, because it does of course come with one. I care a lot about accessibility.

This is the first article I’ve written for the site since the previous editor left, and it marks the beginning of me writing about photography tips and tricks again. Before Marc left, I published three meta essays about photographers and the creative industry; I’m still quite proud of those, and will repost here eventually, but for now, you’re welcome to read them here:

That’s it! My previous Photodoto articles (from February) are linked in the manual mode post, as they’re guides to ISO and white balance. Next on I’ll be telling you the things any photographer should keep handy, a good three or four of which I still don’t have. But I need them, you see? Also, this weekend I’m working on my business, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop me.

As many of you know, I model. I always hesitate to call myself a model, because as much as my feminism has given me confidence and influenced my behavior, thought processes and choices as a person and as a woman, and my borderline Asperger’s has meant many social mores, including harmful ones, have gone right over my head, I have plenty of insecurities, and there’s always someone (or someones) who will use the term against me — who will, for instance, randomly say, “you call yourself a model,” as if that invalidates the point I made about misogyny in an article (this has happened!). Because I’m not tall enough or pretty enough to be agency standard, because modeling is a side thing I do for fun and profit (mostly profit), to some people, I can’t be a model… even though I model. For fun and profit, with my face and my height.

It is, of course, a way to put me down — to say “you’re wrong about everything because you have an overinflated ego about your looks,” which is wrong on several levels, starting with internal logic and ending with me having an overinflated ego about my looks.

These comments mostly come from outside the creative industry, or people I met through it but who, in that moment, I’m not talking to as a creative industry person.

The other day I was browsing PurplePort, where I have accounts as a model and as a photographer. I mostly use the first one because the site is geared towards amateur or semi-professional photographers who are looking for models and willing to pay them, and I’m looking to get paid. So I was there the other day, and a thread caught my eye from the forums digest on the homepage — someone was talking about being badgered for a reference, i.e. a public review.

I clicked into the thread, and it turned out the poster had been receiving multiple messages from a photographer she’d worked with, asking for a reference. It goes without saying that when someone asks for a reference, they want a positive one; they want an endorsement. This put her in an awkward position because the photographer had, among other things, tried to push her levels. Everyone was supportive and helpful, and many urged her to report the level-pushing to the administration of the site.

Level-pushing. That’s a term I’d never heard before.

Levels, on this site, in a photographer/model culture that stretches from fully clothed to hardcore pornographic, indicate how “far” a model is willing to go — specifically, how naked and how sexual she is willing to get during a specific shoot. Level-pushing is, therefore, a photographer trying to persuade a model to do something she’s not comfortable with and/or hasn’t agreed to.

Funny. I would call it harassment and coercion. Because, you know, there are laws about that, not just moderator rules on a website.

This also brings up my first issue with this whole thing: the term “levels.” High and low. Higher and lower pay. Sex sells, and it commands more money. The more naked you are, the more valuable your time is. And that is understandable, but it brings a whole host of issues with it, many of which culminate in — you guessed it — harassment and coercion. And that’s what I want to talk about today.

Disclaimer: 1) Every single one of these things is something I’ve personally had said to me, happened to me, read, or read about. 2) If it happened to me, the photographer who said or did it is not someone whose work I have shared. 3) Every single one of these things has been done by a male photographer to a female model, so that is the dynamic I will be talking about. 4) I think nudity is beautiful and I support sexual work, pornography and, in fact, sex work of all kinds when it’s a safe and fully consensual choice. 5) There are issues within all industries, and I don’t think people who work in porn are necessarily likelier to harass and coerce than people who do art nudes, and I don’t think misogyny, harassment and coercion are in any way limited to those types of creative work.

Now. Some things I don’t want to see, hear, read, or read about again.

Misogyny, Harassment and Coercion in the Creative Industry: A Few Choice Things I Never Want To Hear Again

You’ll get more money if you go up to nude. A lot of people do things for money. A lot of people are comfortable with those things, and some people will push themselves a bit to be comfortable with them. It makes poor people more vulnerable than others, but ultimately it is an individual’s choice to make that doesn’t concern me.

What concerns me is photographers using this to convince a model to do something they have previously expressly stated they don’t want to do. I once replied to a casting call that gave rates for fashion/lingerie, topless and nude. As usual, the price rose with the level of nudity. Nothing in the casting call indicated that these things went together, or that the photographer wasn’t interested in doing a fashion-only shoot for two or three hours.

The photographer, actually, had a specific setup in mind that he hadn’t described in the casting call. He did fashion outdoors for an hour, then went back to his house to do topless for another hour, then went on to nudity. He was willing to do topless only, but he didn’t think it was worth it to just do fashion. It paid less, anyway. “Models usually go up to nude because they want the money.”

Then he went on to reassure me that everyone was comfortable with him, and it was fun, and implied that I was prudish because of my nationality (yeah, sure, okay. Even playing by stereotypes, the comparison made no sense). Which brings me to my next point:

You’re a prude if you don’t want to do nudity, or you’re not brave. Equating bravery and sexual confidence and “liberation” with your modeling levels is commonplace, and no one seems to question it. “If you’re not afraid of nudity” is a phrase I saw in a casting call two weeks ago. We forget that:

1) Models are doing work. This is not their personal life. This is not even their private life, because in most cases they’re agreeing to having the photos used for whatever the photographer wants to use them for: shared, sold, published. There are contracts where they can say they don’t want their name associated with the photos, or that they don’t want them published. Ultimately, that is a risk to take: how many people have we seen who have no respect for private photos? I once saw a random guy publish a naked picture of his ex-girlfriend, without her consent, on a facebook group I belonged to. I called him out, and people “like”d my comment… and he remained in the group. And once your privacy is violated in public, on the Internet, there’s no taking it back.

So a model is choosing what type of work she wants to do based on: what she feels comfortable doing, what she feels comfortable with other people seeing, what she wants out of her career, how she wants to be represented to potential clients, brands, companies, friends, family. She’s making a choice based on whether she feels a photographer will genuinely respect her during and after the shoot. We’ll come back to this. But she’s making a work choice. It doesn’t reflect how much sex she has or has had, how many sex partners, whether she enjoys sex or not, whether she’s comfortable with sex or not, whether she’s repressed or not, or whether she’s turned on by it or not. These things may affect her choices, but they’re separate from what she does as a model. Someone can be completely confident in her sexuality without wanting to pose naked for random strangers, or for a specific stranger, or hell, for a friend or an acquaintance or you.

A photographer actually told me once that if you had a good body, you should show it, and if you had a bad one, you should hide it. The message is: “you’re ugly if you don’t pose nude.” That’s the underlying message. Guess what? Someone can love their body without wanting to share it with everyone else, or with you. Someone can hate their body and still share it with everyone else, and even with you. It’s their choice. It’s their body.

How people don’t get this is beyond me.

2) Women’s sexual liberation, and feminism in general, is about women getting to make choices, and having those choices respected. Sometimes, it takes bravery to stand your ground and say no. Actually, a lot of the time it does. Sometimes, liberation looks like a choice to not have sex. Sometimes, liberation looks like asexuality. Sometimes, liberation looks like men’s desires, or anyone else’s desires, not being the sole deciding factor or a factor at all in a woman’s sexual choices. Fancy that.

Conflating bravery, sexual confidence and the choice to do nudity plays into the insecurities of models. Most people want to be brave, and be seen as brave. They want to be confident and be seen as confident. They want to be cool and they want to be desirable. The line may be “if you’re not afraid of nudity,” but the message is: “if you don’t want to pose nude, you are obviously a prude, sexually repressed, not as cool as other women, not as cool as the ideal woman in my head, not better than other people.” That’s a coercive message. And it’s not okay.

You’re wasting their time if you don’t pose nude. I call this “the guilt-trip.” You’re negotiating rates with someone and they tell you if you don’t pose nude, it’s not worth the time to get to the location, or the travel expense, or the equipment, or the studio they’re renting. You get to a shoot and the photographer tells you they’ve actually never done a non-nude shoot with someone, and they agreed to work with you because [insert reason, often pitying — in my case, it was that I could use the money]. The underlying message is a condescending, not even subtle hint that really, you might as well pose nude, even if you explicitly discussed and agreed that you wouldn’t. Maybe now, or maybe some other time. The intent, whether conscious or not, is to make you feel guilty and feel like you owe them something because you both agreed to a shoot that is not the photographer’s favorite thing to do, or doesn’t get him off, or isn’t worth his time or money.

It’s a bit like a man paying for your drink or your dinner and being disappointed — and sharing with you — that it didn’t buy him access to your body, or consent to sex. That’s what he spent his money for? He’s not getting something you never said he’d get, even after he spent all that time and/or money on you? What a waste. It wasn’t worth it.

On top of being coercive, these comments are also harassment at best, because who’s not incredibly uncomfortable and uneasy after being told they’re not valuable unless they give access — photographic or otherwise — to their body? That sure makes for a fun shoot.

Something else that makes for a fun shoot: not giving models privacy to change. “Just change here,” or not realizing that somebody wants you to leave the room. Not offering to leave the room in the first place. Because come on: if someone is fine changing in front of you, they won’t be waiting for something to do it. If they’re waiting for something? They’re waiting for you to get a clue. “Just say it,” you may suggest, but then, you might say, “Just change here.” And we’re back at square one.

Another small obvious one: touching someone without permission. Always get consent first. Seriously. Every time. Makeup artists can touch to an extent. Stylists can touch to an extent. It goes unsaid. But a photographer can convey a pose or request without touching someone, so if he wants to touch to do it, he needs to get consent. (Special disclaimer on this point: this hasn’t happened to me, and I haven’t heard about it from anyone I know. Consider it a bonus tip, if you will. It can never be stressed enough.)

You’re insulting their experience/work/person if you want to set down guidelines. Many photographers I’ve seen explicitly state that their model is more than welcome — encouraged, even — to bring a chaperone. But there are some who actively discourage it — who say a model bringing someone along to make her feel safe is disruptive.

Then there are the people who are offended when you say you’re not comfortable going to their house/going to a far-off location/getting in a car with them/whatever your safety measures are. They’re offended. You have insulted them. Never in sixteen years of his career has someone he’s never met before been concerned that someone they have never met could perpetrate crimes against them, and set measures to put themselves at ease.

Look, I get it. No one wants to be thought of as a potential murderer or sexual predator or rapist. But to most women, most men (and sometimes other people) are Schrödinger’s rapist.

Give that article a read. It’s a good one. My bottom line: by disregarding or balking at someone’s safety measures, you are saying: “my ego is more important than your comfort.” You’re also dismissing statistics, centuries of crimes, and centuries of women being blamed when they don’t take whatever precautions someone considers necessary for women to take. But when we try to be as careful as possible, they are dismissed and disregarded because you are “not that guy,” and you can’t believe the gall that anyone would think you might be.

But we don’t know that. And by dismissing our safety and comfort, you are being a little bit that guy.

By doing any of the things I described, you are being a little bit that guy. You are raising flags. In some cases, you just need to check your misogyny. In some cases, you are perpetrating harassment, or you are perpetrating coercion.

In most cases, you are disregarding women’s safety, concerns, autonomy, and choices. In most cases, you are minimizing the value of women as people, and placing all value on your access to their body. In all cases, you are making someone uncomfortable as fuck.

This may be a little too complicated for the sad state of my brain right now — I’m high on lorazepam, holy crap, that went down with glee — but here’s a try for the #donttrysohardlinkup:

For as long as I can remember, I’ve disliked my face. I’ve talked about the eyebrows and my trichotollimania, and I’ve talked about the fact that I’m really thin and my eating issues have nothing to do with body image and everything to do with side effects of anxiety medication, my very recently on-the-mend sleep schedule and my low appetite.

But I still don’t usually like my face. I do, and I don’t. I love watching myself — I love looking at pictures of myself, and I love seeing my mouth move when I talk on videos. I’m fond of me, in the way you’d be fond of a good friend. But sometimes I look in the mirror and I feel ugly, or rundown, or just not that special.

I mean, I am not that special, and usually that’s not a bad thing. But sometimes it makes you question things, like whether you’re being dumb making modeling portfolios on places despite not fitting agency standards with your quaint 5’4″ of height and your sunken eyes and your blah Leighton Meester jawline (don’t knock it, it’s helped me get used to mine) and the acne scarring and so on and so forth.

Anyway, it’s not like the modeling industry’s ever been present before. That part is new. Disliking my face isn’t.

But the thing is, when I started taking selfies, I started to like my face. I learned it, I saw it from many angles, I looked at it from a different perspective. It’s still my face, which means I’m never going to be impartial on it, or partial to it. I’ll feel pretty, but I won’t say I am. I’ll say I’m cute, or adorable, or looking really funny.

Makeup — and Photoshop — often cover some of these things — when my jaw sticks out weird in an otherwise good shot, when my tooth sticks out over my bottom lip like a hick, when my acne scarring is particularly obvious. But I try not to overdo it. I try to go by my own principles, the ones I use for other models where I embrace everything that’s a facial feature and only retouch on request.

I wear makeup about twice a month, just when I model, because when I get home and I have makeup on, I feel dirty and I want it off. I used to never go out of the house without for a while there, for a few years — though to be fair I went out once every other week. I think, even though I’ve never said it, that starting antidepressants in the middle of summer helped me be less tied up to my makeup. I’ve never been a makeup person; I was a person who needed makeup to hide the things she didn’t want other people to see, because she was ashamed.

But I’m not anymore. Now, makeup and retouching are choices for me. I’m still not fully sure when I should wear makeup — I default to not for the OCD type reasons mentioned above and I’m sure I’ve made a faux pas or two. But I don’t care because I felt comfortable, even in front of the camera, and at the end of the day that’s all I want to be: comfortable with my face. Comfortable with my choices. Trying hard for me — for my mental health, for my business, for my self-esteem — and not for anyone else.

All photos in this post were taken in late April/early May by my best friend, Annemari S. The only one I’m wearing makeup in is this one. The other pretty chick in the pictures is Ashley!

It’s not even particularly creative. I don’t do it to be cool, or shocking, or edgy. I don’t do it because it contradicts what I assume to be the first impression people get of me — that I’m quiet and shy and not very special. That’s okay, too: I am quiet, and shy, and pretty ordinary. I’m not incredibly smart or incredibly beautiful or incredibly talented. I value joy over skill and put respect and consent above just about everything else.

I enjoy learning things, and I enjoy the results of doing what I love. I love a lot of things. I try to keep my emotions in check because they can veer into anxiety fast, or this weird overwhelming feeling where I just have to scream and jump and dance because I love my cat so much.

On the not so loving end of the spectrum — though, actually, there’s often love powering it — I also get angry easily, and furious not all that unusually, either.

A lot of that intensity goes out of me through cursing. I think swearing is a super effective resource if you use it well and I’ve never understood why you shouldn’t curse around kids or why swearing makes clean spaces dirty. The words are there for a reason. It’s only because I put respect or consent above everything else that I won’t curse if a space or a person finds it unpleasant. In that space. To that person.

But it’s bullshit. Chalk it up to my being a borderline Aspie if you want. I think it’s crap and I think it’s really fucked up that it’s normal to call people out on their cursing but you can’t call them out on being offensive in the ways that count — you know, when they imply that someone is less than human or anything because of their religion, race, sexual orientation, level of able-bodiedness, gender identity.

It makes me angry that people think being called racist is worse than racism. That they can’t be misogynistic if they’re a woman, or that calling themselves a feminist means they’re aligning with feminists who want to force certain choices on women. To me, feminism is about giving women the freedom to make their own choices. To me, feminism is knowing that there’s a lot of work left to do, that intersectionality is not optional, that the voices of the oppressed must be amplified, and that society reinforces isms in a lot of ways and those ways can be eradicated.

To me, feminism is putting respect and consent over one’s own ego. It’s never, ever, ever claiming that it’s more important for you to be able to say a word or a turn of phrase than for other people to not be hurt. It’s listening more than you speak, and shutting up when you fuck up.

My feminism is based on the principle that a person should never have to put up with abuse of any sort from other people. Any implication to the contrary makes me angry.

So I’m angry a lot. People call it a choice, and it reminds me of when people call depression a choice, or tell other people that they’re looking for ways to be offended. That’s when I start yelling that words mean things, and that’s important.

Like, y’all. I believe in respect and consent, so I make a point not to curse when people ask me to even though I think it’s fucking bullshit, and I doubt I’ll ever change my mind on it. (This is my space.) Why can’t you do the same with things that actually matter? Why do some people consider their words to be exempt of being held to the same standard? Yesterday someone called me hostile for being angry — hurt — at their suggestion (explicit, not implied) that I should “suck it up.”

There’s a lot of that going on around here. Never quite so clear, though. There’s this idea that you should accept life as it is because it’s never going to be different. Maybe not. But it’s definitely not going to be different if you sit back and let shit happen. I get that some people reach that stage of not caring out of self-preservation, which I can’t fault them for. But you can’t turn around and tell people to care about the same things you do to the same degree that you do. The fact that you call it “coping with” and “dealing with” says: these are bad things happening.

But the truth is, most of the time, bad things don’t happen. People do them. And no one is telling those people to not do those things. They’re saying “boys will be boys” (“trolls will troll,” “people will treat you like you’re less than human,” “people will blame you for your mental illness,” “people will call you lazy if you’re unemployed no matter how much energy you put into searching for work”) instead. And, well, they will if you don’t do anything about it. If you learn to roll with the punches and tell other people to do the same thing.

I don’t want to be punched. I don’t deserve to be punched. I want people to know that. I want people to know that I get angry, and I want people to know why. I want my feelings out there. I’m a glass half empty person a lot of the time, and do you know what I’ll always consider a stroke of luck? That I can do this. That I’m comfortable voicing my feelings and politics and that the way I work at the moment allows me to do this. Occasionally someone will tell me it’s unprofessional, and don’t I want to be treated like a professional?

Well, honestly, I want to be treated like a human being. A whole one that thinks and feels, and tries to do the best she can. Sometimes I’ll fuck up, and I’ll acknowledge it. I’ll apologize and listen and do better. I’m starting from scratch, so hiding things is a choice I’d make, and one I don’t feel comfortable making at the moment. The return on investment doesn’t look certain at all. I’d rather people who don’t like me step away from me.

That may not always be viable. So for now, I’m embracing my anger. And if you think I’m “too sensitive,” or “overreacting,” or that I need to suck it up and shut up, you can fuck right off with your fucking bullshit. I’ll block your ass and your comments and the IP address you rode in on.

This has nothing to do with this post. I just like Pepper Potts. She’s my role model.

Being poor makes you poorer. This is not a joke. Someone I follow on Twitter recently shared links to a few articles on the subject — articles explaining why it’s actually pretty damn expensive to be poor in ways that no amount of budgeting can fix and that advice on saving money forgets about. Taking advantage of deals and buying in bulk will save you money — if you can afford to let go of a big chunk of it in one go. Investing in quality is costly, and will get you gross looks from people who think you should buy four cheap things for the price of a good one. Loans and payment plans come at high-interest rates you just can’t afford to take on. Things go bust and pile on and on because you can’t replace them. It goes on and on.

This isn’t even taking into account the hypocrisy behind anti-welfare politics, the social pressure to spend money on socializing itself, the stigma behind admitting you can’t afford something, the assumptions that you’re lazy and don’t want to work if you’re unemployed, the assumptions that you cannot possibly be poor if you are employed, the amount of time and energy it takes out of you to fill out paperwork, the anxiety of insecurity, the prejudice and the shushing and the pretenses.

Frankly, it’s exhausting. If you’re poor and you’re also a minority in some way — neuroatypical in my case; disabled, not white, a woman, trans, genderqueer — it’s even worse. You get told to be thankful for what you have, and you find yourself thinking you’re lucky to have a home, because so many don’t — and then you get told you don’t deserve your lifestyle because you’re not doing enough, and someone who works a job shouldn’t live less comfortably than someone who doesn’t.

You know, because “there are always jobs somewhere.”

My family has been living on less than 500€ a month for over six years. Unemployment benefits are something like 430€ a month, and sometimes family helps us out, but sometimes even family thinks you’re not doing enough to look for a job and provide for yourself and your family. Should you really have a cat? Should you really feed him cat food? Should you really get a laptop? What are you really doing all day online when you could be out there looking for a retail job that no one is advertising? Why aren’t you applying to a job that you’re in no way qualified to do?

All this means, among other things, that when I say I want a steady income, my ideals are lower than you might think. What someone else is used to budgeting for food for themselves for a week is what my mom has to budget for food for four people and a cat for a month. It’s not naiveté that makes me think I can live on less, but experience: I don’t know how to live on more.

Here are five of the reasons:

1. High-interest credits and loans are not even an option if you don’t have an income. Unemployment doesn’t count. Two months of revenue from an online shop don’t count. Financing options from tech giants aren’t available to you. The bank will basically say “no,” and then say “no” another five times for giggles. And you’re not asking for a mortgage; you’re asking for the equivalent of a month’s salary for a menial job.

I mean, maybe I could invest in myself and move out and then make the money back, but I won’t know until I spend money that I don’t have and cannot get anyone to lend me. So I’m stuck.

2. Seriously, buying in bulk saves money. Sometimes shops will have three for the price of two offers on my shampoo, but I only have enough cash for one bottle, so I’m screwed. As someone who sells photography prints and products, I continually have to let go of the idea of bulk printing cards, phone cases or anything larger than 5×7 because getting a discount on 8x10s requires buying ten or more of them and I just can’t spend 20€ on the spot when I need to pay for postage. I’m not even going to get into food deals because you might as well cut me up and throw me to the wolves.

3. Looking for a job costs money you don’t have. Some heavily targeted job-seeking websites (and flat-seeking websites!) charge a fee for membership, so you can’t access the job listings unless you pay. You need decent clothes to go a job interview. You need money to print out your resume. And that’s if you even have a computer, and an Internet connection. That all costs money, too.

4. Stuff piles up and you can’t catch up with it. My sister needs new glasses and she’s still wearing the ones from two prescriptions ago. Now the optician says she should get contacts, which are 75€ per eye for six months at minimum. I, too, was wearing glasses from two prescriptions ago until I found low-cost online sites. Not sure how good these are for my eyes, but at least I can read street signs and the weight of my parcels at the post office.

For a long time, we were behind on bills because we couldn’t just pay two at once and stay ahead of them. Not to mention the bills were due before unemployment came in on the 10th of the month.

The oven stopped working a decade ago. We have since used a) a stovetop oven my mom borrowed from the elderly lady she cares for, b) the microwave, a supermarket deal which has had to be replaced twice, c) an electric oven that my great aunt gifted us and which also stopped working a good two years ago, d) the stove. At least the stove keeps working. On gas butane, which keeps going up and isn’t any less expensive than paying for whatever other thing people use for hot water, and let’s not even talk about the electricity bills, which are fucking ridiculous and hey, you can’t contest unfair bills! Legal fees, what legal fees? And hey, so here’s this 300€ monthly bill I can’t afford to pay, and I could contest it but I have to pay it first because otherwise I’ll have the electricity cut off. I’m not going down this road because it’s an anxiety trigger, and these days we’re “lucky” to pay an average of 112€ a month. From 430€ of unemployment benefits. And then there’s the phone bill, which is roughly 50€ a month, and they try to withdraw the money without telling you when.

5. If there’s no money in your account when a company tries to pay your bill, you get charged extra. My phone company has a 15€ fee for it. I had to pay that fee a few months ago even though for the majority of that month, I’d made sure to keep the bank account stocked with the necessary amount of money for that very bill.

This is just a sampling of the many ways people living under the poverty line are pushed and pushed to stay there, and basically screwed for their foreseeable future, which, as you can imagine, is brilliant for morale and gives me all the energy and motivation in the world to get up in the morning and fight against my situation.

Except that, wait. No, it does not. But at least I have a roof over my head, right? And I bought a laptop I needed to contact my support system and work, so I can’t possibly be that bad off.

Full title: I’m Thin And No One Can Make Me Feel Bad About It: Acknowledging Systematic Fatphobia And Playing To Fashion Industry Standards

It’s national eating disorder week, it turns out. I wrote out my thoughts after someone put out a #journorequest on Twitter looking for people in the fashion industry to talk about weight standards and the controversy surrounding size zero, and this seemed like a perfect time to post them — especially considering I’ve been mulling over this post since November and I obviously suck at sitting down to write things, so I’m probably not going to find the time to write a better essay. You get this instead. Hopefully it’s a start.

I keep trying to make myself work on my usual Friday Loves post, but I’m having trouble because my mind keeps going back to something else. So I’m going to listen to it.

When I first started writing my first (but hopefully not last) Read This post, it didn’t have that many links and it had a second section tentatively called Addressing Stuff I Found, because the initials spell out AS IF, and that’s how I feel about the things I want to address. Now I’m thinking it’s too silly and may give people the wrong idea about how serious I am when I say:

The word ‘slut’ is a myth. It’s a concept that exists entirely to stifle women’s sexuality. If you try to define the word slut, you come up with vague, undefinable, relative terms like “promiscuous” and “loose morals.” In the end, what defines a slut is the person using the term and what they consider acceptable for a woman to do, wear, say, or be. If you call someone or something ‘slutty’ in a negative way (or in any way, most of the time), here’s what you may not know you’re saying: “Women who approach their sexuality and sex life in a different way from me are inferior.”

Here’s what you may not realize you’re implying: that a woman must conform to what society expects of her. Her sexuality is not for her to control and do with as she wishes. She must be innocent and pure, but she can’t be too innocent and pure, because she must end up with a man to be worth anything and that man will expect her to acquiesce into his sexual needs, so she must be open to sex but, whether she likes it or not, she must keep it hidden and not flaunt her sexuality, because that will make her trashy and therefore unsuitable for a real relationship with a man who’s allowed to have had as many partners and as much sex prior to the relationship as he wishes, but is also allowed to judge her harshly for having had more partners than he considers acceptable for a woman to have while simultaneously assuming she must have sex with him even though as per his ideal she’s inexperienced and may not even like it. It doesn’t matter, though, because her sexuality, like we covered above, is not for her to control. Her sexuality isn’t hers at all. Her sexuality may not exist, as long as she’s willing to loan her body as an accesory for somebody else’s.

Do you disagree with all or part of this and still use the word ‘slut’? Stop using it, because that’s what you’re saying. If you were horrified reading that, good news: it’s easy to stop doing it by not using words like ‘slut’ or ‘whore’ in a derogatory way. If you were horrified because it made no sense, good news: now you know that the societal expectations on women are impossible to meet and mutually exclusive and the word slut is consequentially nonsensical as hell. Prefer to make sense? Stop using it.

Look: when you say women who post sexy selfies are slutty and desperate for attention, that’s what you’re saying. When you say women who flaunt their sexuality will never be appreciated for their personality, that’s what you’re saying. When you say you don’t want to dress like a whore for Halloween instead of address the fact that society pushes revealing costumes on women who may not be comfortable wearing them, that’s what you’re saying. When you say women who dress in revealing clothing must do so to attract men and they’re disgusting for it, that’s what you’re saying. When you say it’s sad that women dress in revealing clothing to attract men then turn around and say you dress in modest clothing because men find it sexier, that’s exactly what you’re saying.

Essentially, the idea of a “slut” is a myth told to women to keep them in their place. Just as Santa will not actually bring you coal on Christmas if you break a few of the house rules, you will not actually turn into an intrinsically tainted, unpalatable creature if you break one of society’s rules and have sex with one too many men. The word “slut” isn’t a criticism for having too much sex necessarily, but for being a woman: a real, living, breathing woman with quirks, foibles, normal sexual feelings, and personality; and failing to live up to the societal ideal for a woman: the passive, pliable, perpetually innocent, and sexually available Barbie doll.

Do you get it now? I hope you do. If you still disagree, be aware that I only have so many spoons to deal with misogynistic attitudes, and I may freeze or delete your comment at my discretion. But do feel free to say so: I’d rather know who to stay away from than be hit unawares by a safe-looking post. I was hit by three of these over the past week, and two more last. It’s saddening, and appalling, and hard to avoid the way blogs are set up. You see, I love fashion and beauty and decor and crafts and photography, but blogs like this don’t feel the need to label themselves sociopolitically. Which is fine, and perfectly understandable. But it means I don’t know how far from my views someone is until they randomly make a post panning women who share revealing pictures of themselves online. And my heart just gets crushed.

Tomorrow, if I have the spoons, I’ll tell you about something else that crushes my heart. But for now, I wanted to let all this out. Feel free to share/tweet/pin/reblog/spread either this post or the one linked above. Thank you.

• Kickstarter: Stop Telling Women to Smile: Around The Country. From the Kickstarter pitch: Stop Telling Women to Smile is a public art series that addresses gender-based street harassment. The work consists of drawn portraits of women who have told their stories of harassment, and wheat pasting those portraits as posters with captions that speak directly to offenders on outdoor walls.

The goal of the campaign has been met and surpassed with still 11 days to go, but the more money they raise, the further their reach, and it doesn’t hurt to spread the word about it, too. Get their message to as many people as possible. So do take a look.

• Continuing on the harassment theme (and trigger warning for that!): Teaching Naked, Part 1 and Part 2. How a teacher turned a student’s written harassment of her into a learning experience, and the obstacles (read: misogyny) along the way.

• A Question for Us All by Marsha Phillips: “If the concepts we discuss in our circles are universal, why aren’t our audiences more representative of the communities that we live in? Where are the people of color?” Food for thought and suggestions for creating a more inclusive blog/site. Relevant to everyone.

• On the Huff Post: 23 Things Every Woman Should Stop Doing. My kneejerk reaction to this website is ‘ugh’ and my kneejerk reaction to the article title is ‘don’t tell women what to do,’ so really it’s anybody’s guess why I clicked on the link… but this is a good list, actually. It would only be better if it were framed differently. After all, it’s basically a list of things that male-dominated, male-run society has ingrained in women to strip them of their confidence and control their lives. Yes, women internalize those things and dole them out as advice to other women via mediums ranging from word of mouth to magazines, but to blame that behavior on them is wrong and harmful. Here’s a better title for that article: 23 Things People Expect Women To Do But Women Don’t Owe Anyone. Here’s another better title: 23 Things Women Are Taught To Do That They Should Feel Free To Stop Doing. I’m sure I could come up with something more concise if my sister weren’t using my noisy old laptop in my room right now, but you get my drift.

• Your Best Is Enough: How to Take Care of Yourself and Run a Business at the Same Time by Hannah Braime. I could quote the whole thing and talk about how relevant it is to me, but here’s a tidbit: How we show up each day depends on how we’re doing, mentally, emotionally and physically. In order to show up at our best, we might need a morning, an afternoon, a day, 10 days off. Sometimes that means that the super duper important if-I-don’t-get-this-done-today-the-world-will-collapse tasks can wait until tomorrow (because they’ll still be there then). Truly worth a read.

• On Being Multi-Passionate by Kim Lawler. For anyone who, when writing a bio, ends up with a string of words like this: fine art photographer/product photographer/model/fashion designer/seamstress/graphic designer/blogger… and then some. Apparently there’s a new label going around to describe this sort of thing, and it’s “multipassionate solopreneurs.” It… sounds interesting. Douchey, says Kim. And I wonder if it’s more or less so than the term I sometimes apply to myself in the coziness of my own head: Renaissance woman.